John Casor

John Casor (surname also recorded as Cazara and Corsala),[1] a servant in Northampton County in the Colony of Virginia, in 1655 became one of the first people of African descent in the Thirteen Colonies to be enslaved for life as a result of a civil suit.

In 1662, the Virginia Colony passed a law incorporating the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, ruling that children of enslaved mothers would be born into slavery, regardless of their father's race or status.[2] This contradicted English common law for English subjects, which based a child's status on that of the father. In 1699, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law deporting all free Black people.[citation needed] But many new families of free Black people continued to be formed during the colonial years by the close relationships among the working class.[1]

  1. ^ a b Heinegg, Paul (2010). "Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware". Retrieved March 7, 2011.
  2. ^ Taunya Lovell Banks, "Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit – Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia", 41 Akron Law Review 799 (2008), Digital Commons Law, University of Maryland Law School, accessed April 21, 2009